00:11
Alright, this is more of a free talking episode where I just turn on the mic and talk whatever
that's on my mind right now. And it's probably gonna be very naïve and pretty pointless,
but if you would entertain your ears, go ahead. And if you don't feel like it,
skip this episode right ahead. Alright, you've been warned. Let's see. I am currently trying
to pack for about a 10-day break where I'm combining some national holidays with work
from home setup so that I can spend some time outside and travel. And I very much enjoy this
flexibility that my current job as a postdoc allows me. I feel like this is not always the case for
many people, even postdocs, I think. Certainly in my grad school days, my type of experiment,
depending on a season, I mean, depending on where you are in experiment plan, you could
just sort of travel and take your data with you and not necessarily be in a lab every day,
but because I was working with a pretty finicky instrument that required constant care,
I kind of try not to travel as much as possible or I would plan my travel around my
instrument's condition. I don't know if people do this, but we put a name to our instrument as well,
so in our case, the laser part was called Bertha and the other part, the detection scheme part,
were called Claude. And we just wanted to come up with a name that sounded like
and cranky old people, but still in a style of Bonnie and Clyde, you know, like the duo of,
I guess, partners in crime, you know, like mischievous partners in crime. And we always
03:03
never knew what exactly was wrong with Bertha or Claude, so we wanted to come up with a female
name that starts with a B and a male name that starts with a C that sounds kind of snobbish
and mischievous. I don't know if Bertha or Claude sounds mischievous.
I also feel like I don't know if it's mischievous or mischievous, because it's one of those English
words where the way you pronounce is not necessarily obvious. Okay, I'm gonna put
Google on here. How do I pronounce this word? Mischievous. Okay, it's mischievous. I got it
right. Anyway, so yeah, it means to causing a showing a fondness for causing trouble in a
playful way. Yeah, playful is a kind word to say there, but I don't know how to say that in
Japanese.
Well, yeah, so we just wanted to come up with two mischievous-sounding but also snobbish-sounding
guy and girl's names that start with a B and a C. So Bertha and Claude is how we named them.
Let me know if anybody else named their instruments. And the reason why Bertha
is Bertha and Claude is Claude is because these instruments, okay, some parts of it have been
up to date or updated over the course of the years, but the main component was designed and
assembled when my PI arrived to the university as a freshly minted assistant professor
before he got his tenure. So that was 25 odd years ago. So we just wanted to give it, you know,
like an old person sounding name, even though 25 years in human age is not that old. I feel like
in the world of electronics and in a world of electron-based detection system,
25 years is a pretty old technology. Yeah, and I think it comes with pros and cons. It definitely,
because it was homemade mostly, at least the Claude part, the detection part was 100% homemade.
Bertha was 70% commercial. So we bought a box of laser and by a box, it's really a two giant box
06:13
with one smaller box. And how giant you might say, it's, let's see, it's sitting in an optics
table that's about two meters wide and no more like 2.5 meters wide and two meters long.
So, and it took up the entire space. So this system of laser box is a pretty big box.
And the output of that would be feeding into our harmonic generation system, which was a homemade
homemade instrument. But, you know, second harmonic generation is not that hard.
What was hard was the optical parametric amplifier part. So we call it OPA, optical parametric
amplifier. Without getting too much into the details of what it actually does,
it just gives us an option to get a bunch of different colors from an 800 nanometer input.
So we would get the output of box one and two and split them into two with the beam splitter.
90% of this output would go into the OPA and the 10% goes into the harmonic generations. And,
you know, by the time it enters OPA box, it has maybe about 10 watts on a good day
of 800 nanometers. That's about 40, 50 femtoseconds long of a pulse. And by the time
it comes out in UV wavelength, which is usually what we often use OPA for, you know, a 200
nanometer light would come out to be anywhere from, you know, after all of the upconversion
systems. I would say, like, if you get like a couple of milliwatts out of that, it was a job
well done. So it's a lot of reduction from how much you put in and how much you get out. And
we would use all of whatever we can get from usually, you know, the UV light because that's
our pump wavelengths to, you know, kickstart the experiment. Yeah, sometimes I really miss
working on these lasers, even though at the time I was a grad student, I felt like I spent so much
time looking after Bertha and Claude, the two laser boxes and the detection systems. You know,
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there's so many moving parts. There's so many things that could go wrong.
The temperature sensitivity of the laser definitely made it really difficult to work
in summer. So when it gets hot or actually when it gets really cold and the heater goes on in
a building, I would have to worry about the stability of the laser because the system was
so sensitive to the point that if the room temperature shifted by more than one percent,
plus minus one percent, so two percent total, sorry, plus minus one degrees, which is two
degrees, you know, window. If it went beyond that and if the laser felt that, it is going to
misalign the laser and it's going to give us either a different output or much weaker output.
And neither of which you don't want to happen, especially during your three-day scan experiment,
for instance. So we had to learn how to align these lasers.
Even when you did a good job aligning it, you would still have to do this every three or four weeks
and every day if the temperature is going haywire. But I don't know, there was something
something almost therapeutic about cleaning the crystals, aligning the lasers,
make sure you get the most gain out of minimum amount of round trips.
Y'all don't know what I'm talking about unless you also worked with lasers and also have aligned
amplifiers or region amplifiers. But it's, you know, it takes maybe, it used to take me,
when I first started, it used to take me like half a day to align the entire system.
And by the end of it, I think I was able to do, if there was no major issue,
was able to do this in like an hour or so. And so it was, you know, less of a hassle once you
get used to it. But yeah, like sometimes you just plug your music or podcasts in.
You're usually in a dark lab. You want to turn your lights off when you're working on some of
these lasers and with your goggles on and just no one to bug you because people don't want to
work in pitch dark lab. So yeah, and just doing that for one afternoon or, you know, maybe half
the afternoon. That was kind of nice. The lab right now, I still have optics lab, but I have
a bunch of VIP tours that come in and go sometimes unannounced. I guess that's the
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nature of museum lab. You know, you have to entertain these donors who give us money and
funding to do research. And, you know, some of them are interested in what we're doing,
which is a good thing. But sometimes I think these people just show up unannounced or
they just decide on a whim that they want to check out the science lab.
And so sometimes I'm not prepared at all. And, you know, doing some work in the lab and then
suddenly have to turn on my socialization switch on and describe science and whatnot. So yeah,
sometimes I really miss working in quiet in a museum, sorry, in a university lab
where there was no VIP tours. There is no oji to this chat, but I see that it's about 12 minutes,
almost 13 minutes. That's a good length for an episode, right? All right. Bye.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
